I've seen animated GIF images of screen casts (like the one below) promoted a few times on this site as a way to improve answers.

What toolchain is being used to create these? Is there a program that does this automagically, or are people taking screencasts, converting them into a series of static frames, and then creating the GIF images?

LICEcap (http://www.cockos.com/licecap) is much simpler than any of the solutions below, because it's GUI-based. It's free as in freedom and price. The only downside is that you have to run it via Wine.
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DennisJun 17 '14 at 22:56

5 Answers
5

those are the required stuff, ImageMagick, MPlayer and Desktop Recorder.
Then use Desktop Recorder to capture a portion of the screen/application to use as the screencast. After the Desktop Recorder has saved the recording into an OGV video, MPlayer will be used to capture JPEG screenshots, saving them into the 'output' directory.

I have Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and byzanz 0.1.1-4 comes with it. It's in universe/gnome repository, I found, when I typed "sudo apt-cache showsrc byzanz". I installed it and it works exactly as you demonstrate. Thanks for pointing this cool package out -- is a huge timesaver for developers to demonstrate new features to clients.
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VolomikeSep 27 '12 at 19:20

2

Thanks, nice tool! The colours are not always accurate, but that's a minor detail. I've written a shell script which helps with capturing a window (selected on runtime by the user), posted in an answer below.
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Rob WOct 14 '12 at 15:46

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Byzanz doesn't have any UI! Am I supposed to guess the x, y, width and height of the area I want to record? It's a little ridiculous that in 2014 I'd still have to do this.
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Dan DascalescuNov 3 '14 at 23:35

@DanDascalescu No one says you need to use it... I much prefer a terminal than a GUI, what is wrong with that?
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Bruno PereiraNov 4 '14 at 8:39

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@DanDascalescu There's no need to guess. You can use xwininfo to get the window properties.
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Marcus MøllerJan 21 at 12:53

Usage

Save one/all of the following two scripts in a folder within your $PATH. Here's an example on using the first script to make a screencast of a specific window.

Run byzanz-record-window 30 -c output.gif

Go to the window (alt-tab) you want to capture. Click on it.

Wait 10 seconds (hard-coded in $DELAY), in which you prepare for recording.

After the beep (defined in the beep function), byzanz will start.

After 30 seconds (that's the meaning of 30 in step 1), byzanz ends. A beep will be broadcast again.

I included the -c flag in byzanz-record-window to illustrate that any arguments to my shell script are appended to byzanz-record itself. The -c flag tells byzanz to also icnlude the cursor in the screencast.
See man byzanz-record or byzanz-record --help for more details.

Are these scripts kept someplace like github? They're super useful, it'd be nice if they were kept someplace better than text in StackOverflow answer.
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KFroJul 3 '14 at 22:30

@KFro This is Ask Ubuntu, not SO ;) No, I haven't put them in a git repository, because the scripts themselves are badly documented (for users). The accompanying documentation is included with the answer, so I see no benefit of splitting up the files and documentation in a Git repository.
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Rob WJul 4 '14 at 7:43

If you aren't running a supported version of Ubuntu (you should really upgrade!) you will need to download the latest version from the GitHub page and manually satisfy the dependencies (you can procure yad and ffmpeg from here and here respectively) or, if you are running a slightly more recent version such as 13.10 you could try downloading the .deb directly.

If you're using Gnome you might want to install the Topicons extension to make stopping Silentcast easier.

Usage

Start Silentcast from your desktop environment's gui or run the silentcast command in a terminal. Pick your settings and follow the on-screen prompts. When you're done recording you will be presented with a dialog for optimizing the final output by removing a certain number of frames.

For more in depth usage guidelines take a look at the README, either the online GitHub version or the local version stored in /usr/share/doc/silentcast with zless or your favourite editor.

Notes:

Silentcast is still in the development stage and although it is quite stable you might encounter some bugs. If you do please report them on the project's GitHub issues tracker. If you have trouble installing from the PPA and are running a supported version of Ubuntu leave a comment below or contact the maintainer (me) on Launchpad.

@FranciscoCorralesMorales Can you run it from the command-line and then try? Once it crashes take the output and upload it to paste.ubuntu.com and link it back here so I can take a look. Thanks!
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Seth♦Nov 18 '14 at 2:35